


Milk and Honey

by orphan_account



Series: Collected Tumblr Prompts [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Afterlife, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Turned Into a Ghost, Ghost Bucky, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-12
Updated: 2014-10-12
Packaged: 2018-02-20 19:52:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2440901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You have always been a cocky, determined son-of-a-bitch. Things are vague here, and things you were sure of when you were alive become much harder to keep a grasp on. Your name, for instance. That is eaten away almost immediately.</p><p>On this side of the mirror a lot of things about yourself get eaten away. You can’t see them, but you can hear them: the swarms of insects that follow you wherever you go. They consume bits of you, slowly, and without pattern or purpose.</p><p>(Prompt: <b>Ghost/Living person AU</b>)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Milk and Honey

You fall for a long time, and ice and gray sky becomes silver behind your eyes before your body even collides with the ground.

The silver is just the wrong side of the mirror, and you have been swallowed by it. It looks like liquid, and you try to slam your hands against it but you can’t. Your voice would be hoarse from screaming if you still had one.

*

You have always been a cocky, determined son-of-a-bitch. Things are vague here, and things you were sure of when you were alive become much harder to keep a grasp on. Your name, for instance. That is eaten away almost immediately.

On this side of the mirror a lot of things about yourself get eaten away. You can’t see them, but you can hear them: the swarms of insects that follow you wherever you go. They consume bits of you, slowly, and without pattern or purpose.

But you keep moving forward, if that’s what you can call it when you don’t quite have a body. The landscape is mostly silver, and you feel like you should be able to see your reflection in the walls that you pass, but you are on the wrong side of the mirror.

But you are determined, and you know that he won’t last five minutes without you, so you have to get outta here somehow.

(You don’t know who _he_ is, though. The buzzing, biting bugs took that quickly. Not so fast as your name, though. You remember trying to wave them off, fight back. You tried so hard to cling onto who he was. That is why you know it is important you get back to him.)

*

There are cracks in everything. By the time you find the crack in the mirror, the sound of the insects swarming behind you is more you than you are. You wander for a very long time, following a winding path and never getting tired, but also not getting anywhere, until eventually, you hear it.

So much of you has been consumed by the buzzing swarm that you almost don’t recognize it as his voice, but it cuts through to something in whatever if left of you, and you step off the path, following the sound.

You have long since forgotten where it is you are trying to get to, but slowly his voice gets louder, gets clearer, and you know you are approaching somewhere else, as if anything else has ever existed.

You find the crack, and your not-fingers scrape at it, and your not-mouth screams through it, and you push and push and push and the swarm buzzes louder behind you as if telling you that this is forbidden. That you have found something you shouldn’t have. That you should go back to the path.

You push, and push, and push – and eventually something cracks and gives, and you are surprised to find it isn’t whatever is left of your self.

*

Following him silently, you leave the swarm behind. You can never take back what they devoured of you, but there is just enough of yourself left that you find him, and you follow him through an unfamiliar place.

You are so used to being on the wrong side of the mirror that it is overwhelming, and everything you see is lights and people and _things_ that you don’t recognize. It is almost disturbing, but he is there with you, even if he doesn’t know you are there. And sometimes he seems just as mind-boggled by certain things as you are, and that is a comfort.

There is no buzzing sound anymore, and every sound you hear is wonderful. The roar of wind, the screeching of traffic, the canned laughs on the television, the sizzle of bacon in a frying pan, and his voice.

His voice is the thing that you cling to, and you listen to it like it were music. He sleeps and you lie next to him, unseen and unfelt, just glad you are there to watch over him. You like to think your presence makes a difference somehow.

*

One day he sits by the window and sketches a face that you recognize as your own. He looks out over the skyline and props up his sketchbook so that you can see too, and he says: ‘I think you would like it here.’

You do – at least in comparison to the other place – and you try to say so, but you have no voice.

He says: ‘I miss you so much.’

You say: ‘I’m right here with you, pal.’

He makes an aborted movement, glancing over his shoulder as if he heard something.

He gets up and tears out the page with your face carefully lined onto it, and takes it with him into the bedroom. It goes onto the bedside table, and he sleeps with you on either side of him, oblivious.

*

One day he is sitting at the dining room table, eating with his friend – a guy called Sam that you are grateful is there to tell him not to do stupid shit in your stead, since he can’t hear you even when you yell at him.

You are sitting on the floor, with your head on his thigh and your eyes closed. All of those things are only vague approximations, of course, since you have no body to sit, and no head to rest, and no eyes to close. But you get the idea.

You listen to Sam as he says, ‘That drawing in your bedroom, is that who you lost?’

He nods. Answers, ‘I can’t remember a time I didn’t have Bucky.’

And that is how you learn your name again.

*

For some reason, you can never hear his name. People must say it a hundred times, but you never hear it. It never sinks into what is left of your consciousness.

Some part of you was really, truly consumed in the other place, on the wrong side of the mirror. You mourn for it.

*

Sometimes you get angry at him for not hearing you, seeing you, knowing you are there.

You shout and rant at him and gesture wildly, and it is times like these you feel the most real.

*

Sometimes you follow him to places that are meant to be private, try to crawl into his naked body and you whisper to him how much you wish you had one too.

*

Sometimes you think he hears you.

*

He is half asleep in the morning light, tangled up in blankets from the bed and you are lying beside him tracing shapes onto his skin with your not-fingers and he says, ‘That’s ticklish, Buck,’ with a groggy voice and half-lidded eyes.

You pull back instinctively, feeling like you’ve been caught doing something you shouldn’t.

He opens his eyes a bit more, and he looks at you for about ten seconds with recognition. Neither of you breathe – you because you don’t have to; him because he can’t.

After a while he blinks, and the half-second seems to clear his gaze, and he looks right past you again.

He’s on the phone a while later with his voice choked and broken and he says, ‘I just miss him so much.’

You say: ‘I’m right here with you, pal.’

*

Apparently his job is doing stupid shit and nearly getting himself killed. One time he comes back from a mission bleeding from a gash on his chest, and he flops down, exhausted, on the couch and doesn’t even try to clean his wound.

You tell him off, but he doesn’t hear you.

Somewhere, distantly, you think you can hear the buzzing sound of the swarm on the other side of the mirror, so you do something without thinking, because you want to stay.

You climb onto his body as if you have a body, and you fasten your lips (as if you have lips) to the wound on his chest, and you taste his blood.

And you can actually taste it, and it tastes like milk and honey, mellow wine and barley.

As soon as if you have tasted of it, you wonder why you did. But the buzzing sound fades.

You stand up and move away from him, staggering without stumbling because things that do not exist don’t stumble.

*

The next time you talk to him, he hears you.

You don’t expect it. What you are saying to him is: ‘You’re clearly exhausted, idiot, clean yourself up and go to bed.’

He stares at you for a long time as if he has seen a ghost. You suppose that is what you must be, and shuffle on the spot, looking down at the hands you do not have.

'Bucky…?' he asks, and he sees you.

Later, when he has started to believe that you are really there and that maybe he is not going mad, what he says is: ‘Did you really come back from the dead to mother hen me?’

You laugh for the first time in nearly a century. It sounds like the rush of the wind.

*

He refuses to sleep that night, because he is so sure you will vanish if he does.

Many times you both reach out to touch each other, to hold hands, to reassure.

Every time your fingers go through his, like sifting through a shadow. Eventually he cries, and you wish you could hold him to comfort him, so you just murmur assurances that you are right here with him, and you will never leave.

He cries until he sleeps, which you are thankful for. But you fear as well that he won’t see you when he wakes.

*

'I don't know your name,' you tell him one day, because apparently this is permanent. No one else can see or hear you, but he can.

He tells you what his name is, but you don’t hear.

'Right,' you lie. 'Thanks.'

Apparently that is a part of your that was devoured for good.

You are on the right side of the mirror, but you don’t belong here. You are just a reflection.

But he sees you.


End file.
